Sad News

Soon after learning of Robert Jordan's passing I received a text message with sad news that hit much closer to home; my former neighbor's cat Jake, had died over the weekend.

Jake was the cat that taught Foster how to get in touch with his feline side. Not understanding that dogs are suppose to sit on the floor or on the seat of the couch Foster would mimic Jake and perch himself on the back of the sofa. He carried this tendency into the car where, when not trying to stick his entire body out of the drivers side window, he prefers to sit on the center arm rest, sitting so that all four paws are completely on the console.

The two of them could spend hours chasing each other around Jon's apartment, never letting the other have a moments rest, but once they were done playing they would cuddle up together on the couch or the bed or whereever one of them was to lie down.

Jake was the embodiement of the pure cat. Always carefree (except when Freeloader happened by to steal his food) but with an air about him that made you quite aware that he knew who was in charge and it wasn't that "two-legs" who happened to live in his home. Always willing to curl up on the couch and enjoy some TV but at a moments notice could decide that he wanted the door opened and was not willing to take "no" for an answer.

He will be missed.

RIP, Jake Terry.

3 Days till P-Day

That's "P" as in parents.

Only 3 more days until my Mother and Father as well as my Brother, Sister-in-law and their 3 kids show up and only 7 more areas of my apartment to bring up to code. Over the 3 day weekend I've managed to clean up my spare room/office and that's about it. Now that I'm out of room in the extra closet I'm not quite sure what to do with the rest of my stuff.

Tonight's challenge, the living room and stairwell.

Just when I thought I was out...

... they pull me back in.

I've been able to pretty much ignore the Wii virtual console since every time I checked there was nothing I wanted, but after reviewing some of the games now available I'm having a hard time not leaving my office to go buy a Nintendo points card.

Curse you Mario, and you're little Yoshi too!

It's been a good weekend

First the Senators win game 5 of the Eastern Conference championships to clinch the title and earn a spot in the Stanley Cup finals and then I get a call from Bill with the news of the birth of his bouncing baby girl, Ariane Émilie.

She's pretty cute, with her mothers eyes and her fathers hair (do they make baseball hats in size 0?).

Just kidding Bill, congrats!

Am I alone in this..

.. or has anyone else noticed that 24 is looking less and less like a spy show and more and more like an episode of "One Tree Hill", just with less gun play.

In the last episode alone you had the jock find out his girlfriend is sleeping around, the street smart hero told to stay away from his girlfriend by the protective dad and a couple of auxiliary characters get into a nonsensical fight and breakup.

But still I watch it every week. Go figure.

Round 2, Game 1

2nd period is almost over and it's 4-3 Ottawa with New Jersey on the attack. I'll admit I'm getting a bit nervous about my prediction of a 4-1 Ottawa Series with the Devils winning Game 2 but period 3 will be a whole new hockey game.

Built for Drivers

.. as long as you don't really want to know what's behind you.

Well I guess that's what you get when you choose a car based on style more than functionality.

Even so, I love my new G6!


(You'll have to forgive the pic quality; I just snapped it on my phone while taking Foster for a walk)

WoW

I've managed to make it 3 years without ever having played World of Warcraft but as of a few weeks ago that all changed. Now I'm spending almost all of the time I'm home on the game. At least I do get away for a least 8 hours a day since we don't have it installed at work (unlike some people I know, not pointing any elbows, Rand) but I'm sure if I could I'd be popping in every few hours to see what's up. It's that addictive.

I liked Guild Wars but it's level 20 limit and difficulty in getting a group of friends together to quest, kind of acted like buffers from full blown addiction. WoW on the other hand makes it so easy to interact with other players that you find yourself helping complete strangers along on their own quests for no other reason than you can. It's that level of interaction which is almost totally absent from Guild Wars that makes WoW the crack to GW's caffeine. Both are addictive to some degree but Warcraft is just in a league of it's own.

I blame my niece.

She's Back!

I give you the return of Stephanie:


Thanks again to the Ottawa Sun.

Previous: You are my Sunshine

David vs. Goliath

Saw the oddest thing on the way to the game last night (Sens beat the Thrashers 5-3 btw). Just outside the arena in what is essentially the parking lot and right in front of a cop, a Nissan Titan (and yes you were right J.) rear ended a Honda CRV.

You'd think that if this truck:

hit this baby SUV:
the outcome would be obvious, but you'd be dead wrong.

In what was not a glowing endorsement for Nissan trucks the Titan was essentially obliterated right back to the front wheels while the CRV by comparison, could probably have driven all the way home without the driver even noticing he was hit.

Which all leads me to one questions: Is Nissan trying to cut costs by making their vehicles out of paper mache? I can't really think of another explanation.

More Blogger Troubles

So it looks like the Blogger Dashboard is now classified as a 'sex' site under my offices internet filters and therefore off limits.

I wonder if this post had anything to do with it.

Sorry for the light posting

I've been sick for the past week with the flu so not a lot of blog time spent at home and have been fighting to get some program fixes in at work to beat an unmovable deadline so even less there.

Then there's the little issue I have with the lack of a 'blog this' type button under the new blogger. Whereas before I could just click a button and make a new entry for any page I was on and found interesting now I have to go through a few more hoops to actually make a post. Nothing big but just enough to make me not want to bother when I'm just getting in some quick browsing.

Building Excitement!

So the decision has been made, the deposit handed over and I should be getting my new car sometime by the end of March. As I type there is a GM factory somewhere receiving an order for a brand new 2007 G6 GTP with my name on it.

Not that my Grand Am hasn't been a great car but I just can't wait to pick up my new keys and test out my additional 77 horses.

"Isn't it Ironic"

and unlike Ms. Morrisette's 1996 song, this does fit the definition:

At last nights "Troop Appreciation Night" at the Senators hockey game, an enthusiastic supporter was waving around an extremely over sized cardboard or plastic "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon which in her excitement she did not notice was hitting one of the uniformed servicemen sitting two seats away from her in the head on every swing to her left (the symbolism of that I'll leave for you to dwell on).

And to make matters worse, as the crowd began to laugh and cheer she began to wave it more franticly forcing the soldier to have to cover his head with his hands but all the while smiling and being a good sport about it.

You are my Sunshine

Is there really any point in continuing with the Sunshine girl page in the Ottawa Sun after Sundays offering? Where can you go after you've already reached perfection?

Since the link is fixed to the Sunday page and will change every week I present to you, Stephanie:

Canada 4, Russia 2

Canada takes the World Junior title for the third year straight.

Congrats!

I was stuck at work with no live feed available (streaming video is blocked) but I was able to follow the action on various hockey forums and the TSN site. It was pretty quite all afternoon as a lot of people suddenly remembered 'family emergencies' that required their immediate attention some time around noon.

Our Deepest Sympathies

Earlier today MacDaddy was called into one of our managers offices for the grim task of receiving a condolence card with respect to the passing of his step father. I only met him a few times but he seemed like a really decent guy and a Mac and him were pretty close.

In true Mac style by the time he was back to our cubicle he was cracking jokes and was grinning from ear to ear. Some people might think that this was just some sort of reflex meant to hide the pain but those of us that truly know Mac, and truly understand the inner workings of his twisted mind know that the laughter was less of a defense mechanism and more due to the fact his step father died 6 years ago, which was right about the time we circulated the card for everyone to sign and make donations.

I guess we know at least one manager who doesn't take advantage of our once a year, Office Cleanup Day.

Still not much done ...

... on the Blogging front. It's amazing how little gets done when you have all the time in the world.

The good news is that my parents new computer is up and running with everything ported over successfully. I am having IE7 issues though. It's not a major concern as I've switched them over to FireFox ages ago, but I felt I may as well install it.

First, who was the genius at Microsoft that decided to buck the trend over the last 20 years and
move the menu bar from the top to underneath the address bar. I'm also having issues with the refresh and stop commands being seperated from the forward and back by the address box itself. And apparently the home and print buttons no longer even deserve the privilege of being on the main toolbar. Now they are regulated to the tab bar, which looks seriously cramped if you use it to open up even a half dozen tabs at a decent resolution. Using 800x600, which so many people never change their systems from, would make the tab bar almost useless.

None of these would be major issues if they allowed any customization at all but the drag and drop functionality is next to non-existant even with the toolbars unlocked and don't even think about moving or removing commands from the various built in toolbars. For crying out loud you have to do a registry hack just to get your menu to appear in the same place it does in every other piece of Windows software.

Oh well, it's still a vast improvement over IE6.

Well back to Zelda. If I don't finish Twilight Princess before heading back to Ottawa I may never finish it.

Still here

Just not blogging a lot, either reading or writing.

Flew to Labrador City on the 15th (missed my original flight because of a runaway dog) and then made the 6 hour drive to Goose Bay on the 16th for an early Christmas with my brother and his family and made the return drive on the 18th. All in all an eventful first weekend of my Christmas vacation.

The change in flights did up costing me about $400 but meeting Megan in the Montreal airport kind of made up for it. Turns out her father was one of my chaperons on my school trip to Europe in grade 10.

My mother would kill me if she knew, and luckily she doesn't read blogs, but I almost stayed in Sept Isles overnight as my original rescheduled ticket called for, instead of spending the $350 for a ticket on another airline, just because me and Megan were having such a good time. Hey it's not everyday I strike up a 3 hour conversation with a beautiful girl I've never met before.

While the preliminaries are done, I still haven't made the final move to the Blogger 2.0 format. For now I'm using the excuse that I'm waiting to get my parents new computer up and running before investing too much time; in actuality, I'm just lazy.

So in the meantime, I'll drop a couple of interesting links to keep you busy:

• Found via LGF, PM Harper takes a stand against Hamas. It's taken most of my adult life, but we've finally gotten a federal government in that Canadians can be proud of. One that's willing to take a stand based on what's right and wrong not on what's popular.

• Via Campus Watch, again by way of LGF, this story of ABC news analyst, Fawaz Gerges, trying to equate the Palestinian troubles with the Holocaust. Yeah you know, I'm sure European Jews were also reaching population growth rates of just over 3% (West Bank) and almost 4% (Gaza) during the Holocaust (statistics via Wikipedia). Of course there's also the small point that many if not most of the deaths he uses to prove his point were caused by other Palestinians and in the case of Iraq, Muslim fundamentalists, but why let facts get in the way of a good moral relativism argument.

• Finally, Michelle and an army of interested bloggers continue with search for the elusive Jamil Hussein. I have a feeling Big Foot will be sitting down for an interview on The Tonight Show before the AP can produce their oft quoted source.
  

That's all for now.

Wii Update

My Wii has arrived a day early and as per my agreement with Microplay I purchased two games to go with it (and then a third from Future Shop) but despite a search of almost every electronics store in the Greater Ottawa area I am without a second Wiimote controller so only 1 player games for me for now.

So I picked up Need For Speed: Carbon, Super Monkeyball: Banana Blitz and of course, Zelda. I haven't tried Zelda yet but so far I have to say Wii Sports (comes with the system) is pretty interesting, if for no other reason that to watch Airyck jump around the room swinging the Wiimote wildly trying to hit a fastball. Monkeyball is one of those games that the Wii just excels at. You simply move the controller just like you want the monkey to move and voila, perfect synchronicity. Some of the mini games, of which there are 50, take a bit more time to get used to but like Wii Sports, it's a great way to learn how to handle the Wiimote and Nunchuck.

NFS on the other hand feels a little more forced. After switching from the default configuration to one that utilizes both the Nunchuck and Wiimote I could at least finish a race but it seems a little bit overkill. And having played it just a few days ago on Airycks 360, the difference in graphic detail is plain as day, to say the least. It's still fun but I wonder if it just wouldn't be more so if it just used the Gamecube controller.

The online service leaves a little to be desired as it seems most of it is still not up and running. My guess is they're waiting for more systems to be activated go through the update process before bringing more parts online. Even so, they only have a fraction of the games that were promised available in the Wii Shopping channels. I'm assuming that will change as time goes on. I just hope they begin offering demo downloads like the 360 does. When it comes to console games I'm a big fan of the try before you buy system, and on a system as unique as the Wii that concept has even more value. We'll just have to wait and see.

Overall, a very interesting gaming system and even though the graphics really don't compare with the latest Microsoft or Sony offerings, with games like Wii Sports and Monkeyball which rely more on gameplay than graphics, it should carve out a strong market for itself.